Strategic auto-exoticism: Camara Laye’s L’Enfant noir (1953) and Fatima Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood (1994)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Camara Laye’s L’Enfant noir (1953; The Dark Child) and Fatima Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood (1994) explore coming-of-age stories and postcolonial identity through autobiographical, anthropological accounts of colonial childhoods. Both texts can be read as auto-exotic as they are written in the language of the colonizer (or for an international audience in Mernissi’s case), and portray exotic rites and commonplaces designed to appeal to a western readership. However, these auto-exotic and anthropological elements form part of a complex strategy that aims to undermine them and, instead, convey messages of cultural complexity, dignity, harmony, and intersectional Muslim feminism. The auto-exotic serves as a pretext for the re-appropriation and re-creation of the world colonialism has destroyed in Camara Laye, and for the empowerment of women against all forms of oppression – colonial, cultural, or religious – in Mernissi.